Back to County Government?

I was reading the "Saturday Chat" in The Lowell Sun and when I got to the jump I thought that Kendall Wallace was saying it is time to bring back County Government.

For those of you who have never heard of County Government, it is the way most of the nation (and some of the Commonwealth) achieves decentralization, while retaining the efficiency and effectiveness of some degree of centralization.  Just about the time I got here, we the people voted to do away with most of County Government.  My sense, at the time, was that we didn't wish to waste our tax dollars on that degree of decentralization/centralization.  Now we have the folks on Beacon Hill providing too much centralization.

I believe Mr Wallace is correct about the value of some consolidation.  But, I suggest we don't need a hodgepodge of arrangements for all the consolidations we might benefit from.  That said, I am not sure the old Counties were small enough to meet today's needs, which are centered, as Mr Wallace says, around police and fire and DPW and the sharing of big equipment and computer systems.  Actually, it isn't the computers as much as the software.  After all, how many copies of Microsoft Project do we need in the area?  I would say one planner and one computer and one copy of the software could handle Lowell and the surrounding towns.

If you looked at the link at "County Government" above, you might have thought that Middlesex County, our County, is pretty big. I think that is the case.  We should be looking for an organization that is sized to meet the common needs, values and responsibilities of a group of citizens.  You can get a sense that Middlesex County is too big an entity from the fact that we have two Registers of Deeds (ours is Dick Howe, who will be on WCAP Monday at 0700).  Also, SEVEN of our ten members of the US House of Representatives represent a piece of Middlesex County.

Mr Wallace is on to a good idea.  However, it needs a bit of refinement.  Maybe next Saturday will reveal more.

Regards  —  Cliff

PS:  Attribution for the phrase "needs, values and responsibilities" goes to Dr John Richard Paron